In many instances, it is desirable to be able to divide one or more streams of fluid material into a plurality of portions having a constant and controllable volume relationship therebetween. For example, as described below, portion size control is desirable in many segments of the food processing industry.
Some commercial food products are manufactured using a commercial grade food processing machine to grind up and mix various ingredients to provide a fluid output having a paste-like consistency. The fluid output is then further processed in order to provide a finished product. Examples of this include cookies, where the food processing machine provides dough having a paste-like consistency that is subsequently baked, and sausage, where the food processing machine provides filler material having a paste-like consistency that is put into each link of the sausage casing.
The material provided by the food processing machine can be carried away via a conveyor belt located at the output of the food processing machine. The stream of output material from the food processing machine can then be subsequently cut with a mechanically driven knife or other suitable means so that the combination of the food processing machine, conveyor belt, and cutting means provides a plurality of substantially equal portions. It is often desirable that the relationship between portions remains constant so that, for example, each cookie is the same size or each sausage link contains the same amount of material.
Increasing the number of portions output by the food manufacturing process can be accomplished by using multiple food processing machines to provide multiple portions simultaneously. However, commercial-grade food processing machines are often very expensive and, in situations where the volume of the output of a single food processing machine is sufficient to provide the desired amount of final product, employing additional machines is not cost-effective.
Another solution is to divide the output of a single food processing machine into multiple streams. There are many known techniques for doing this including providing a multi-port flange at the output of the food processing machine. However, if the material being provided by the food processing machine is not homogenous and/or if the material contains particulate matter, then the multi-port flange solution may be unacceptable since the non-homogenous and/or particulate matter can cause undesirable back pressure to form at one or more of the ports, thus causing other ones of the ports to output a disproportionate amount of material.
In addition, sometimes it is desirable to provide more than one portioned material. In those instances, the size of each segment of the different materials would, ideally, be proportional to the segment size of one of the materials. For example, a food processing operation could provide shredded meat and barbecue sauce in the same package, in which case it would be desirable that the amount in each segment of barbecue sauce be proportional to the amount in each segment of shredded meat.